SharpSpring Review: How Much Should Marketing Automation Cost?

Hubspot, Pardot, and Marketo watch out! SharpSpring is the X factor in the marketing automation game right now and is making tracks across the industry with their platform, dynamic features, and capped pricing model.

Today’s marketing automation world is dominated by giants like Oracle – Eloqua, Salesforce – Pardot, Adobe, Marketo, and HubSpot – which, by the way, just announced its intent to go public. They have big platforms, large development teams, marketing budgets, training departments, and sales teams.

And price tags to match. In fact, as great as the platforms are, many startups, SMBs, and businesses with large contact databases are simply priced out of the market, which starts at around $10,000 per year and can easily surpass $30,000 for many companies. In my mind, this makes the industry primed for upset by an innovative entrepreneur. Enter Rick Carlson and his team.

Check out their mission:

We believe in the democratization of business innovation. By that we mean we believe corporate monoliths shouldn’t dominate the business world simply because they have the marketing budgets to do so. We want to level the playing field. This is what drives us to empower businesses of all sizes with the lightest-weight, easiest to use and most affordable marketing tools possible.

At the end of the day, SharpSpring offers a few things by way of pricing that just make them more competitive:

$400 Entry Level – It won’t get you much in terms of database size (up to 1500 leads), but what it will get you is full access to all platform features – no need to upgrade to the pro version just to get full use of the system features.

Month-to-Month Contract-Free Pricing Terms – Unlike the marketing automation giants who require a yearlong contract and, oftentimes, full payment up front, SharpSpring has an open door policy and friendly monthly terms. In the unlikely event that you don’t like the platform or you determine it’s not the right fit, you’re free to go.

$800/Month Price Cap – Whether your database size is 1,500 or 150,000 – the price caps off at $800 per month. No need to get greedy, SharpSpring knows that it doesn’t cost them any more to host one versus the other and they would rather make $1 a million times than $1 million once.

Our agency has had the opportunity to research and work with many different marketing automation platforms over the last several years and certainly no one platform fits all. Each has its own nuances that makes one better for specific use, for B2B vs B2C, or small vs large businesses.

That being said, we’re pretty excited about where SharpSpring is heading – and not just because of their pricing model. Subscribe or stay tuned to check out our next article covering the SharpSpring features that we love.